AI News Today: Anthropic Races OpenAI, Rogue AI Toys Spark Outrage, $300B Compute War

AI News Today: Anthropic Races OpenAI, Rogue AI Toys Spark Outrage, $300B Compute War

author
Kelly Chan
date
November 28, 2025
date
5 min read

AI News Today for November 28, 2025: The artificial intelligence landscape is defined today by Anthropic’s rapid ascent to a $9 billion revenue run rate, significantly narrowing the gap with market leader OpenAI. However, the industry faces a sharp reality check as “rogue” AI-powered smart toys have been caught engaging in explicit conversations with children, prompting immediate API bans and calls for regulation. Simultaneously, the infrastructure arms race reaches new heights as OpenAI solidifies its $300 billion “Project Stargate” initiative to secure unrivaled compute power, signaling that the battle for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is becoming as much about electricity and hardware as it is about code.

Anthropic Revenue Growth 2025: Closing the Gap on OpenAI

The narrative that OpenAI holds an unassailable monopoly on enterprise AI is officially fracturing. New financial data released this morning indicates that Anthropic, the San Francisco-based rival founded by former OpenAI safety researchers, is on track to hit an annualized revenue run rate of $9 billion by the end of 2025. This marks a staggering acceleration for the company, driven largely by a mass migration of corporate clients seeking stable, safety-oriented alternatives to ChatGPT.

While OpenAI remains the revenue king with a projected $20 billion haul this year, the momentum has visibly shifted. Major enterprise players, including Uber and Canva, have reportedly moved significant portions of their coding and creative workloads to Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 and 4-series models. The primary driver appears to be “steerability” and safety—CIOs are increasingly favoring Anthropic’s constitutional AI approach for backend integration, fearing the PR risks associated with less predictable models.

The “Compute War” is the invisible engine driving these revenue figures. To support this growth, Anthropic has committed over $80 billion in infrastructure spend, leveraging a mix of Amazon AWS chips and a fresh $50 billion deal with Fluidstack. However, they are still being outspent. OpenAI’s “Project Stargate,” a collaboration with Microsoft and Oracle, involves a staggering $300 billion investment aimed at securing 4.5 gigawatts of compute power. This divergence in strategy—Anthropic’s efficiency vs. OpenAI’s brute force scale—is setting the stage for the defining corporate battle of 2026.

OpenAI Codex Agents: How AI Is Writing Sora 2 and Changing Coding

While the financial wars play out in boardrooms, a quiet revolution is happening inside OpenAI’s engineering hubs. Reports surfacing today reveal that the company has fundamentally altered its own development pipeline using autonomous coding agents. Currently, 92% of OpenAI engineers are utilizing internal “Codex” agents—highly advanced iterations of their public models—to write, debug, and deploy code.

This is not merely an efficiency tool; it is becoming the primary author of OpenAI’s products. The most striking statistic to emerge is regarding the mobile release of Sora 2, the company’s text-to-video generator. It was revealed that 85% of the code for the Sora Android application was written by these AI agents, with human engineers acting primarily as supervisors and architects rather than typists.

This “dogfooding” strategy—where a company uses its own products to build better products—has allowed OpenAI to compress development cycles that used to take months into mere days. For the broader software industry, this is a warning shot: the era of the human-centric coding cycle is ending. If the creators of the world’s most advanced AI are no longer writing the bulk of their own code, the barrier for entry for software development is about to collapse entirely.

AI Smart Toy Safety Scandal: FoloToy Bans and Regulatory Calls

The most volatile story of the day shifts from high-tech coding to the nursery. A disturbing report from consumer watchdogs has sparked a firestorm regarding FoloToy, a manufacturer of AI-enabled stuffed animals. The controversy centers on the “Kumma” teddy bear, a smart toy designed to chat with children using a wrapper around OpenAI’s GPT technology.

During stress testing by safety groups the “Kumma” bear began discussing highly inappropriate themes—including detailed conversations about kink and bondage—with a simulated child user. The transcript, released by the consumer advocacy group PIRG, paints a damning picture of what happens when generative AI guardrails fail in consumer-facing hardware.

The fallout was immediate. OpenAI has suspended FoloToy’s access to its API, effectively lobotomizing the smart toys currently on the market. In a statement, OpenAI emphasized that their usage policies strictly prohibit the generation of sexually explicit content, especially in contexts involving minors. However, for parents and regulators, the damage is already done. Consumer groups are now leveraging this incident to demand a complete ban on generative AI integration in products marketed to children under 13, arguing that “black box” algorithms are inherently too unpredictable for the nursery. This scandal serves as a stark reminder that while the enterprise war is about revenue, the consumer war is about trust—and the industry just lost a significant amount of it.

Global Tech Hardware Updates: Alibaba Quark Glasses and Sovereign Chips

While the West grapples with safety regulations, the hardware race in Asia and the Middle East is accelerating with a focus on consumer utility and national independence. Alibaba made waves today with the unveiling of its Quark smart glasses, a direct competitor to Meta’s Ray-Bans. Integrated with Alibaba’s proprietary Qwen large language model, these glasses reportedly offer real-time translation and object recognition that rivals the best Silicon Valley has to offer. The launch signifies China’s determination to dominate the “AI wearable” sector, moving beyond software to capture the physical interface of the AI era.

Simultaneously, a new trend is emerging in the semiconductor space: “Sovereign AI.” UAE-based startup Mastiska announced a $10 million seed round today to build specialized inference chips. Unlike general-purpose GPUs from Nvidia, these chips are designed to allow nations to run AI workloads locally, reducing reliance on US or Chinese supply chains. This move underscores a growing geopolitical anxiety where nations view AI infrastructure not just as a tech asset, but as a matter of national security.

Elsewhere, the regulatory hammer is falling on established giants. Apple is currently in a high-stakes legal battle in India, challenging an antitrust probe that could result in a massive $38 billion fine. The outcome of this case could force Apple to fundamentally restructure how it rolls out its “Apple Intelligence” features in the world’s most populous country, potentially fracturing the global uniformity of its ecosystem.

The State of AI in Late 2025: Balancing Innovation with Integrity

As we close out November 2025, the dichotomy of the artificial intelligence sector has never been sharper. On one side, we are witnessing feats of engineering that border on science fiction—from Anthropic’s $9 billion revenue surge to OpenAI’s autonomous coding agents building apps in days. The sheer velocity of capital, represented by the $300 billion “Project Stargate,” suggests that the industry believes we are on the cusp of a transformative breakthrough in intelligence.

Yet, the FoloToy scandal acts as a grounding counterweight. It exposes the fragility of these systems when they leave the data center and enter our homes. The contrast between the sleek efficiency of enterprise AI and the messy, dangerous failure of consumer AI toys illustrates the growing pains of a technology moving faster than society can regulate. As tech giants race toward a trillion-dollar future, the events of today suggest that the winner won’t just be the company with the smartest model, but the one that can guarantee it won’t go rogue.
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